Towel Day 2011

Towel Day is celebrated every 25 May as a tribute by fans of the late author Douglas Adams. On this day, fans carry a towel with them to demonstrate their love for the books and the author, as referenced in Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The commemoration was first held in 2001, two weeks after Adams’s death on May 11, 2001.

The original quotation that referenced the greatness of towels is found in Chapter 3 of Adams’s work The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“ A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)”

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The original article that began Towel Day was posted at “Binary Freedom,” a short-lived open source forum.

Towel Day: A Tribute to Douglas Adams
Monday May 14, 2001 06:00am PDT

Douglas Adams will be missed by his fans worldwide. So that all his fans everywhere can pay tribute to this genius, I propose that two weeks after his passing (May 25, 2001) be marked as “Towel Day”. All Douglas Adams fans are encouraged to carry a towel with them for the day.

So long Douglas, and thanks for all the fish!

– D Clyde Williamson, 2001-05-14

Chris Campbell and his friends registered the website TowelDay.org to spread the word, reminding people not to forget to bring their towels. Towel Day was an immediate success among the fans and many people sent in pictures to show off themselves with their towels.

And so on. You can read the article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day
That’s all from me today, but be sure to invite your friends to celebrate Towel Day! :)